29 September 2014

Walking out with the dogs, every bush was festooned with dew encrusted webs. There must be hundreds of thousands of spiders out there.

This one had an occupant:

There are thousands of these little crane flies everywhere at the moment and even they were covered in dew:

Oh dear - one eats the other:

This character was relatively dew free:

The editing process of everything I've taken from the last month is not going well. I'll get there eventually but expect some unnaturally sunny scenes as we head into autumn.

We are having the front of the house re-rendered due to a shoddy job with too much sand in the mix six years ago so it's chaos here and, with having polystyrene insulation put underneath the new stuff, the house is covered in tiny, white, statically charged balls along with the dust from the old stuff that had to be drilled off. My hoover is having a crisis.

So, until next time, when we should have had our conference Skype call with GOSH, here are the boys playing their usual game. Have a good week.

25 September 2014

When I worked as a picture researcher at the Hulton Picture Library in London, I had a client who became a good friend, Lily. Lily is now writing a fantastic blog about her Dog's Trust rescue dog Flossy who is often depicted interpreting works of art and literature. Highly recommended: http://www.flossyreads.com/ do have a look. Lily asked me to draw Flossy and I was honoured to do so....here she is. As usual, I started with the eye.....

................a bit more detail on the head............

.........a start on her lovely patches....

...........tummy and legs.........

.............working from front to back......

...I showed Lily at this point and she felt her head wasn't square enough so I had a fiddle.....

............better..........

At that point, the holidays and Great Ormond Street took over my life so she sat, unfinished for a few weeks. When I came back to her, I forgot to take any photos so we jump from half finished to.....er..........finished. Sorry about that. She was such a character to draw; I really enjoyed doing her. thanks Lily! I've been doing a pen drawing of Jack this week which has turned out better than I expected. He's very difficult to do - just a sleek, perfect little thing. I'll show you when he's finished. So, until next time, here's lovely Flossy again.

20 September 2014

Every evening in Kingsand, we witnessed the amazing sight of tens of thousands of tiny fish hugging the edge of the coast, moving together like mercury when their silver bellies were in sight. They were entrancing but many were perishing, trapped in rock pools that heated to the temperature of bath water in the daytime sun.

Here they are moving; I hope this works......

Every night at around the same time, the sea would start to boil in patches off shore....

........and then the mackerel would come to the edges and indulge in a feeding frenzy. here they are moving a bit more slowly. They were just a blur when they found the little ones and the surface of the water would be covered in a film of the glittering silver of their scales.

Thousands of dead ones would wash up on the tide:

The Gulls circled around picking off what they could:

Some trapped in rock pools fell victim to Anemones. They disappeared surprisingly quickly, alive to the last. I saved one whose tail had just been grabbed and was shocked at the grip the Anemone had on it.

Like something out of a horror film....

Even on the little beach at Portwrinkle, the number of different rock types is incredible, presumably as a result of being at the edge of the massive granite intrusion in the south west:

OB made what he called Turtous. He had to come home with us and has been reassembled in the garden.

More pictures of the intrepid swimmer:

Proud of himself:

Snippet just won't do it.

A few plants...........

Bittersweet Nightshade:

Er..........not sure but very pretty:

Samphire. We had some one night with our fish:

A Speckled Wood spotted on one of my MANY dog walks:

A terrible victim of tourist fishing, discarded in a rock pool. A beautiful dogfish, possibly of the Lesser Spotted variety:

OB was amazing at GOSH on Monday given that he spent over six hours with the psychologists. M and I had endless forms to fill in after our two hour session answering questions from another psychologist. The forms took two and a half hours. However, it will all be worth it when we have a definite diagnosis. We'll be talking to all of them via skype in a couple of weeks. I can't praise them highly enough. They see what needs to be done and they do it, rather than our previous experience of being fobbed off and passed from pillar to post by our local 'services'. Right - enough ranting - things are looking up we hope and it's taken me five days to get this post out. Hopeless. I have over a month's worth of photos from round here to edit now. Some bits and pieces posts needed I think.

Hope you've had a lovely weekend and, until next time, here are the dogs looking a bit blown out and OB trowing a stone into the water; too big to skim though there was a lot of that too.